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Record Labels Struggle With the Album's Demise
Supplying yet more evidence, if more were needed, of the dire straits the music business increasingly finds itself in — reader cphilo sends us a NYTimes article about the death of the album as the mainstay of profit, and the record labels' struggle to adopt to the new realities. The article notes the trend of the labels signing artists for a single song, maybe two, and a ring tone.
With all songs costing about the same, there's no reason to buy the album.
If the "hit" costs $8 and you like 3 other songs for $1 each, you'll gladly pay $10 for the album.
If record stores want to make money, put the album out for purchase before releasing singles, and price the album and individual tracks at whatever the market will bear.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If a singles album has ten songs on it and costs ten dollars, but only two of those songs are any good, then we are being charged ten dollars for two dollars worth of goods and being told we got our money's worth. This is somewhat like having a vacuum cleaner demonstrated at your house in order to receive "two hundred dollars worth of home furnishings", only to discover that they are giving you a cheap photocopy of a Norman Rockwell.
There's more. Even if every song on the album were solid gold, the fact is that it never cost any ten dollars to get it to the customer. Ninety cents on every dollar (say) goes to developing, promoting, and marketing no-talent "hormone bands" in the hope that they're the next New Kids on the Block. Or what-have-you.
Why should I have to pay twenty God-Damned dollars to listen to thirty year old music? I particularly like Procol Harum, but I would bet that their marginal profit hasn't gone up a cent. The record companies' certainly has, however. If I thought that the band members got a healthy cut, I wouldn't mind paying for such genius. But knowing that record companies use(d) die-hard fans like me to pay for such offensively vapid fare as fills the top 40 charts goes a long way toward easing my conscience about downloading files.
When the technology was firmly on the side of the RIAA, we felt the lash. Now, who's holding the leather? Suck it up, RIAA. It's your backlash--you've earned it.
Good luck selling songs one at a time. The rest of the world beat you to it.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
I'm kind of tired of hearing these discourses on old business models, thinkoftheartists, and other old school crap. Sure, perhaps that doesn't make a lot of sense point blank, but lets face it, the CD and DVD and now other media types give artists and the **AA member businesses the method to create art that is truly worth $18. The fact that they don't get it is reason enough for them to slowly die off.
Has anyone else caught wind of the NIN viral marketing that they are doing right now for a new album? They "GET IT" with how to use the new media and Internet. If the **AA actually got it we would not be having news stories like this. The **AA is losing, they are luddites of the new age, they are consciously killing themselves. If they would simply get on with it, create content that people would want to pay for, we could all rest easier.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
First, if your standard for new, good albums is really that low, you have probably been listening to nothing but what the major labels try to shove down your throat. There are plenty of new concept albums out there, and even more that lack an overarching story or theme but still stand out as fantastic works when taken as a whole. You can certainly find dozens of new albums that are more than just a couple good songs and some filler. You just have to look elsewhere than the latest Justin Timberlake or Gwen Stephani disc.
But mainly I wanted to comment on your statements about marketing. It seems that bands can make a decent living without advertising, but they have to have something pretty unique. Then with a little time and some well placed live shows, they tend to develop a following with no major advertising of their own. I know the last five or six new bands I've found have all been through word of mouth. Sure, they're not as big as top 40 bands, but they have a devoted fan base that's far less fickle than the masses that like someone simply because they're the "next new thing".
Maybe it's the music snob in me, but I tend to think that the only bands that really need marketing to survive are those that aren't much good to begin with, or want to be bigger, faster than good music will get you on its own. In the first case the marketing is counterproductive (blocks air-time and brain space that could be used by better bands), and in the second it seems like all the advertisement does is turn a band with potential into a one-hit-wonder that goes on to release a couple mediocre follow-ups and then implode. Even a great band can never match the insane expectations set by a marketing-driven surge of popularity, because 3/4 of the crowd will move on to the next new face, and the label will push for a repeat instead of letting the music mature.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I disagree. A British punk group named Koopa has made top 40 and is going to release a cd without being signed. Them doing it shows that mass production of CDs isn't the only way of releasing an album. I'd argue that a download/burn at home method is less expensive (and easier on the environment- no fuel spent shipping) anyway.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
Buried in the article was an interesting idea from the record companies themselves: instead of being the channel, they'd morph into more of a fan club model.
That's a great idea, but they should go one step further.
The main problem for record companies is that the record company, for the most part, is not the brand - the artist is. The artist is what's promoted, etc. What would be better, from the record company point of view, is if they had a whole bunch of sub-labels, all of which have their own genre/style/sound/whatever.
Then, you'd know that you like the stuff coming out of a label, because all their stuff was the style you like.
It used to be like this in the old days, where a label like Blue Note would have a whole lot of good jazz, or Elektra Nonesuch had good classical. I knew people that would buy everything that EN put out.
Combine that with a subscription service (or music club, cd-by-mail thing I guess) and suddenly you not only have a business model, you have a core group of consumers that are committed to your label - not your artitst. That subscriber base is a guaranteed revenue stream that you can use to hunt down more stuff that your subscribers want.
Will it lead to the homogenization of the music industry? Who cares? It's already freaking homogenized!
It might make smaller players more viable because as a botique subscription music company you have a guaranteed revenue stream with no distribution overhead (except for the overhead you want). You can budget, plan, and not worry as much about the next payroll.
Ideally you'd have a third-party doing the fulfillment, so all you have to do is find acts that your subscribers might like.
It's interesting to think about, but finding that much talent would be difficult. No matter what people say, there isn't that much talent out there.
The record companies are suffering because their business plans and practices are increasingly short sighted. It used to be that artists were treated as long term investments, being signed for multi album deals, whereas now artists get deals for a song or two. It's another turn in the downward spiral of disposable culture that Hollywood has sold us, and the cycles keep getting shorter.
It's horribly inefficient to operate this way. Instead of going to the grocery store once a week to buy everything you need for the coming week, you make a separate trip for every single item you need. To be even more extreme, go from buying a sack of rice every week, to a cup of rice every day, to a grain of rice every minute. Spend all your time buying rice, and you'll have no time to eat it, and starve.
(Never mind that you can starve anyway by eating nothing but rice, but I digress.)
Well, at least Piero Scaruffi (a well known musical critic) seems to disagree with you:
Contemporary musicians never spoke highly of the Beatles, and for a good reason. They could not figure out why the Beatles' songs should be regarded more highly than their own. They knew that the Beatles were simply lucky to become a folk phenomenon (thanks to "Beatlemania", which had nothing to do with their musical merits). THat phenomenon kept alive interest in their (mediocre) musical endeavours to this day. Nothing else grants the Beatles more attention than, say, the Kinks or the Rolling Stones. There was nothing intrinsically better in the Beatles' music. Ray Davies of the Kinks was certainly a far better songwriter than Lennon & McCartney. The Stones were certainly much more skilled musicians than the 'Fab Fours'. And Pete Townshend was a far more accomplished composer, capable of "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia". Not to mention later and far greater British musicians. Not to mention the American musicians who created what the Beatles later sold to the masses.
The Beatles sold a lot of records not because they were the greatest musicians but simply because their music was easy to sell to the masses: it had no difficult content, it had no technical innovations, it had no creative depth. They wrote a bunch of catchy 3-minute ditties and they were photogenic. If somebody had not invented "beatlemania" in 1963, you would not have wasted five minutes of your time to read a page about such a trivial band.
(Note that I do not agree completely with this, but at least it shows that the status of the Beatles as artistic geniuses is at least debatable)
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize